Return to Transcripts main page

@THISHOUR WITH BERMAN AND MICHAELA

Investigators Piece Together Germanwings Crash; Last-Minute Decision Saves Swedish Soccer Team from Plane Crash; News Conference of French, German, Spanish Leaders on Plane Crash. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired March 25, 2015 - 11:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:31:11] KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: AT THIS HOUR, investigators are piecing together what happened during the final moments of Germanwings flight 9525 in the eight-plus minutes the plane descended before crashing into the French Alps without communication. The biggest clue is this damaged cockpit recorder. Meanwhile, investigators just started the process of identifying the remains of those 150 people onboard the doomed flight. What more can we learn though from these horrific images?

For that, let's bring in CNN safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector, David Soucie.

David, always great to have you. But unfortunately, we're talking again about something like this. Images speak for themselves. As a former crash investigator, I want to get your take on what you see in them, which is important. It's been described as images of horror as described by authorities. What do you see here? This is the crash site from a wide view.

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Right. It's not as wide as the actual accident. It's important to point out it goes far beyond this as well. This is where we see things and clues that we can pick up as investigators and again this is extremely difficult to talk about but in my experience as an investigator, the families need to see this. And they ask to see these kinds of things and understand them. You can see over here at this point we have a fairly large piece of the aircraft and again over here on this side we have a fairly large piece of the aircraft. What this is indicating to me is these were near the largest mass of the aircraft, which includes the wing, the engines and right above that is likely where these came from. And you can see there's some color on this one right here. That is where it says Germanwings is the g and s of the wings part up here.

BOLDUAN: There are human remains in here so we have to be very delicate. These pieces look so small. What are all of these small pieces? Why did it break up so much?

SOUCIE: People say it exploded. It obliterated. There's science behind this. When the aircraft makes an impact, when it hits the -- let's draw an aircraft here. When it hits this mountain right here, these parts, this front part of the aircraft breaks into pieces. There's a pushback from that. So when they hit, they literally come back out of this area. So you have things coming back this way. As those come back, the back of the aircraft still is coming forward so you have massive collisions of large amounts of heavy debris impacting themselves and then coming apart.

BOLDUAN: Let's look at a closer up image. This shows one section closer up. Here's some more as you had said colors which is the tail, right?

SOUCIE: Right.

BOLDUAN: More of this, this debris field is just huge.

SOUCIE: It's massive.

BOLDUAN: How do you as a crash investigator begin to map this to then begin removing it?

SOUCIE: Do you remember when we were doing the MH-370 and did drift- model models? It's not unlike that mapping where each of those pieces are. You can impact them backwards and figure out from the impact point where these pieces came from and that gives you a clue as to at what angle the aircraft may have impacted and how it went into the ground. It also tells you a lot about speed. Right here you can see landing gear.

BOLDUAN: You see it right there.

SOUCIE: A piece of landing gear right there. That's telling us that it didn't burn. So that tells us that was it such an impact that it extinguished itself as it impacted or because if that burnt, that is made of magnesium, it would be smoking. You can see there is smoke here.

BOLDUAN: Oh, yeah. There is.

SOUCIE: What that is, these wheels will continue to burn. You can bury them on a site to get them to go out and months later open it up and the fire is burning because as soon as you put oxygen, it starts burning.

[11:35:05] BOLDUAN: This is one of the big focuses. This is the cockpit voice recorder. This looks badly damaged. What do you see?

SOUCIE: It is badly damaged. There's something very fortunate about this. This is by design. It's not just happenstance. What this does in that box is takes analog information, microphones and audio that comes in and it converts it to a digital to numbers. It's a 24 bit encryption that stores it on these chips in here and there are boards in here like this.

BOLDUAN: Could impact be so great that it would be damaged inside.

SOUCIE: It could. However, this is stainless steel. This is not. Stainless steel is designed for this. Once it's converted and data transfers into these chips, it's permanent. Unless the chip breaks itself, then you're going to get information out of this. There's good information.

BOLDUAN: I want to go back to this for a second. For a crash scene investigator, this isn't just any crash site. This is very difficult to get to. They have to -- some of them have to come in by helicopter and repel down or walk hours long to get to this scene. What do they do when they come upon the scene first? What do you do?

SOUCIE: First thing you want to be cautious about the human remains. You need to flag anything that may be a human remain. You can see the red dots in here. One here, there, there, there. This is again very difficult to see and very difficult to even acknowledge but each of those are likely flags that were placed to identify where those are because at the accident scene, the human remains are treated with utmost respect and they are taken care of individually. The pieces, whatever available. They are documented exactly where they landed and using a similar trajectory follow you can determine which parts of which human are there so it's likely they are able to put those together for the families and say these are the remains of your family member.

BOLDUAN: That's a horrific thought. It's part of the process and it's the job in what families want. They want to know what happened and they want to know why it happened.

David, thank you very much.

Some of these images are going to be seeing more of this, it appears. Now, CNN reporters are gathering a whole lot of pictures. A lot of images from their vantage point sending a lot of tweets out from the scenes that they are seeing on the ground there. Go to CNN.com/Germanwings and check out the reporting. A lot is more powerful in images that you'll see than words you're going to hear. Look at that.

John?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Should also say we could get new information any minute right now a news conference in Paris from French investigators overseeing the situation right now. Those new details ahead.

Plus, it was a last-minute decision that changed their lives. It saved their lives. We'll hear from a Swedish soccer player whose entire team was supposed to get on that doomed flight.

Also, a crackdown here at the capitol. Police telling Congress no more wild summer parties. Really.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)